The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant
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@xaade said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
@lb_ said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
I completely disagree. This implies that most if not all problems have a single best solution after which there can be no improvement.
You have to have a damn good reason to implement a better linked list.
I do. Why do some only allow forward traversal, while others allow bidirectional traversal? Is one of them always better than the other?
@xaade said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
@lb_ said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
I completely disagree. This implies that most if not all problems have a single best solution after which there can be no improvement.
I think you're misunderstanding the scope of the complaint here.
"We had this tool that could do most of what people needed, and left manual labor to the really hard problems. That tool didn't keep up with the times, and if it had, it would have covered even more area than it did back then. Therefore, we've lost ground on simplifying programming."
Ah, I guess I have misunderstood, then. I agree.
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@blakeyrat said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
the point is that the tools should be usable and discoverable enough so that they teach the user how to use them, as the user is using them.
The problem is that you have to start with this one:
No, but seriously, users can't even think through the things that they want to do, let alone figure out how to make it happen. It's simply a skill that many people don't seem to be able to develop. And complicated stuff is still complicated.
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@blakeyrat said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
... but only because all the products used for software development are so fucking difficult to use, not because of some God-ordained law of nature.
That's kind of my exact point.And it's where you're wrong.
@blakeyrat said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
Why is that a good idea when a video editing tool does it and a bad idea when a programming tool does it? Explain.
There are orders of magnitude differences in the complexity involved. Editing video seems like a fairly well defined problem. Solving arbitrary problems is very difficult, period.
Remember all of your rants about people not knowing the details of how Windows wants people to deal with it? Like, for instance, the rats nest of user directories. Local, Roaming, WTF? It's too much for full time professionals to know and remember. These casual programmers of your dreams are never going to be able to manage it.
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@boomzilla said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
users can't even think through the things that they want to do
You need a vacation for that burnout, man.
Besides, when developers say they need to "think in code" and putz around for ages trying to figure out what they want, that's a "good" thing. When users do that in conversation or on paper, it's a sign they're "morons".
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@gąska said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
@blakeyrat said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
That's the brilliant thing about our industry: a hard problem only has to be solved once, EVER, and it's solved for good.
But you have to do this for each and every hard problem there is. And every industry has entirely different set of problems to solve. That's why your claim that this one piece of software from the 80s could make programmers mostly obsolete is utter bullshit.
And then you realize that while the problem you're working on right now is 98% just like the problem you solved before, it's somewhat different and requires something substantially different because of that. Because that's what the users want / need.
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@boomzilla said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
No, but seriously, users can't even think through the things that they want to do, let alone figure out how to make it happen. It's simply a skill that many people don't seem to be able to develop. And complicated stuff is still complicated.
Maybe; but again, we (as an industry) are not even trying.
If we were doing our damndest and still failing, then, ok maybe some of these arguments would convince me. But we're not. All the tools I mentioned above that seemed to be moving in the right direction got deprecated and left to rot.
@boomzilla said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
And it's where you're wrong.
Are you saying that because you believe it, or are you saying that because you personally would become less valuable to the job market?
@boomzilla said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
There are orders of magnitude differences in the complexity involved. Editing video seems like a fairly well defined problem. Solving arbitrary problems is very difficult, period.
Editing video is solving an arbitrary problem.
@boomzilla said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
Remember all of your rants about people not knowing the details of how Windows wants people to deal with it?
Yes.
@boomzilla said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
Local, Roaming, WTF? It's too much for full time professionals to know and remember.
Why should they have to? Why can't the software just pop up a question like "does this data belong to the user or to the computer?" and fix it for them?
I bitch about Discord's desktop app not correctly working with Windows' window preview feature, but is it Discord's fault? Why should they have to think about it? There's literally only one correct behavior here, why isn't that just done for them by default? (The answer: shitty, difficult, tools.)
And we're talking about full time "professionals" who are "professionals" in the sense that they spend a lot of time behind keyboards, not "professionals" in the sense that they know jack shit about creating quality software. Jeff Atwood is a "professional".
@boomzilla said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
These casual programmers of your dreams are never going to be able to manage it.
Maybe not. The excuse "we shouldn't even try because we'll probably fail" is:
- Incredibly pessimistic (and that's coming from me, King of all Pessimists), and
- Lazy (conveniently the less-effort approach is the one you've eliminated with your unfounded assumptions!)
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@blakeyrat said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
There's no math "behind" programming. (What does "behind" even mean in this context?)
Writing a program is a mathematical activity. You probably only think of math as doing calculations. This is abstract math, though.
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@blakeyrat said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
@xaade said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
Or you do, and it's been successfully abstracted away from needing to ever touch it again.
Thus proving my point exactly.
No, you just don't realize that you're doing what you're doing, which is to say, math.
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@lb_ said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
@xaade Then I guess we agree and I've been misreading this entire thread.
@magus said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
@lb_ said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
I completely disagree. This implies that most if not all problems have a single best solution after which there can be no improvement.
Yeah, for that to work, computers would have to run on math.
There are multiple solutions to problems even in math.
Math is hard. Let's go trolling!
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@yamikuronue said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
You need a vacation for that burnout, man.
It's not burnout, just observation.
@yamikuronue said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
Besides, when developers say they need to "think in code" and putz around for ages trying to figure out what they want, that's a "good" thing. When users do that in conversation or on paper, it's a sign they're "morons".
If you say so, but that's not at all what I was talking about.
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@blakeyrat said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
@boomzilla said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
No, but seriously, users can't even think through the things that they want to do, let alone figure out how to make it happen. It's simply a skill that many people don't seem to be able to develop. And complicated stuff is still complicated.
Maybe; but again, we (as an industry) are not even trying.
If we were doing our damndest and still failing, then, ok maybe some of these arguments would convince me. But we're not. All the tools I mentioned above that seemed to be moving in the right direction got deprecated and left to rot.
It's not a tooling problem.
@boomzilla said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
And it's where you're wrong.
Are you saying that because you believe it, or are you saying that because you personally would become less valuable to the job market?
I believe it because it's true.
@boomzilla said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
There are orders of magnitude differences in the complexity involved. Editing video seems like a fairly well defined problem. Solving arbitrary problems is very difficult, period.
Editing video is solving an arbitrary problem.
I can't tell if you're being serious here. Editing video is one problem. The phrase "an arbitrary
$x
" is talking about anything you pick that's a valid value for$x
.@boomzilla said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
Local, Roaming, WTF? It's too much for full time professionals to know and remember.
Why should they have to? Why can't the software just pop up a question like "does this data belong to the user or to the computer?" and fix it for them?
Why do you think they'd answer correctly? Would they even know what you meant? Would they consider the implications in their answer?
@boomzilla said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
These casual programmers of your dreams are never going to be able to manage it.
Maybe not. The excuse "we shouldn't even try because we'll probably fail" is:
- Incredibly pessimistic (and that's coming from me, King of all Pessimists), and
- Lazy (conveniently the less-effort approach is the one you've eliminated with your unfounded assumptions!)
What do you think it would look like if "we tried?" I literally cannot imagine that better tooling, short of strong AI, is going to change this.
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@boomzilla said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
I literally cannot imagine that better tooling, short of strong AI, is going to change this.
I think you just nailed the real problem here.
If you spend your entire life in the bottom of a toilet surrounded by shit, you can't even imagine what not-toilet would look like.
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@blakeyrat said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
If you spend your entire life in the bottom of a toilet surrounded by shit, you can't even imagine what not-toilet would look like.
Fortunately we have you! Enlighten us!
Not that I'm holding my breath. You don't even understand the problem, so the odds of having any ideas about a plausible solution are pretty damn long.
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@boomzilla said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
@blakeyrat said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
If you spend your entire life in the bottom of a toilet surrounded by shit, you can't even imagine what not-toilet would look like.
Fortunately we have you! Enlighten us!
Not that I'm holding my breath. You don't even understand the problem, so the odds of having any ideas about a plausible solution are pretty damn long.
Are we getting lost in tangential arguments?
I can pretty well see that the technology for ancillary tasks involving programming have become more complex and less helpful over time.
I can see that the technologies that helped prop up simple development for non-complex problems have been left behind or become riddled with problems.
These aren't hard to demonstrate.
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@xaade said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
@boomzilla said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
@blakeyrat said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
If you spend your entire life in the bottom of a toilet surrounded by shit, you can't even imagine what not-toilet would look like.
Fortunately we have you! Enlighten us!
Not that I'm holding my breath. You don't even understand the problem, so the odds of having any ideas about a plausible solution are pretty damn long.
Are we getting lost in tangential arguments?
I can pretty well see that the technology for ancillary tasks involving programming have become more complex and less helpful over time.
I can see that the technologies that helped prop up simple development for non-complex problems have been left behind or become riddled with problems.
These aren't hard to demonstrate.
Sure, things like Access have fallen more behind. Again, that's partly due to the requirements changing. We want those sorts of things to be web apps. But even with Access, there wasn't much going on there with users that I ever saw.
I mean, OK, they can easily put up simple forms and stuff, yeah. But that's such a small portion of what's often needed. The query builder was kind of cool, but it was also extremely simple. It's very inadequate for a lot of the stuff I do day to day.
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@blakeyrat said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
Editing video is solving an arbitrary problem.
One arbitrary problem. That's very different from solving all arbitrary problems, or most arbitrary problems.
@blakeyrat said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
Why can't the software just pop up a question like "does this data belong to the user or to the computer?" and fix it for them?
That doesn't solve the original problem: getting the user to understand the difference and know which choice to make. Software development is hard because it's about making decisions that require research and forethought. Of course, it doesn't help that the existing tooling is difficult to use, but making the tooling easier to use doesn't make it any easier to make decisions or have foresight.
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@boomzilla said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
We want those sorts of things to be web apps.
Speak for yourself. I definitely don't want anything to be a web app.
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@wharrgarbl said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
@boomzilla said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
We want those sorts of things to be web apps.
Speak for yourself. I definitely don't want anything to be a web app.
Shut up lazy pendant. That's where so many of the old Access apps have gone, and for very good reason.
But let's get back to pointing out why blakey is wrong. Remember how he scolds people for suggesting developers just put in a checkbox to make something optional? Because it doubles (or more) the QA required? Now apply that to his idea of automated tooling doing things automagically.
Next, imagine his rage when he misunderstands the purpose of something and it does something he doesn't understand or doesn't want to happen. And now how does he tell it not to do that? While still doing what it does, because there's gotta be a reason it's there...namely that someone needs that to happen.
But no, we should solve the halting problem. Don't tell him that it's difficult!
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@adynathos said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
The one place where such tools are being created is game development, for example Unreal Engine with its visual scripting, GUI manager for all your assets, a repository of assets you can import. But the specialization for games makes these not viable for the general case.
For a second, I thought you said Unity, and I was preparing a massive diatribe on that turd, but then noticed you were referring to another game engine beginning with "Un," and now I have nothing to complain about.
Well, okay, I'm still annoyed that a full license with source access would cost about as much as a car up until a few years ago. But if I were to do my project over starting today, I'd almost certainly use it.
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@blakeyrat said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
Why can't the software just pop up a question like "does this data belong to the user or to the computer?" and fix it for them?
It belongs to me, but on my computer. So both.
Why do they make those things sooooo complicated ???
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@boomzilla said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
But let's get back to pointing out why blakey is wrong.
He isn't wrong. For example, it was faster and easier to do CRUD applications with 1998 tools than it is today stuff. A lot of applications are 80% data-entry forms.
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@blakeyrat said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
Could we maybe try to reach that point then?
Right now, we're further from it than we were in 1997.Genexus is still a thing
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@wharrgarbl said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
He isn't wrong. For example, it was faster and easier to do CRUD applications with 1998 tools than it is today stuff. A lot of applications are 80% data-entry forms.
Yes, we can cherry pick stuff like that. But then, do we really want those sorts of CRUD apps any more? I mean, crud is a pretty appropriate acronym for a lot of them.
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@boomzilla said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
Sure, things like Access have fallen more behind. Again, that's partly due to the requirements changing. We want those sorts of things to be web apps.
Speak for yourself!
Edit: 'd
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@masonwheeler said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
@boomzilla said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
Sure, things like Access have fallen more behind. Again, that's partly due to the requirements changing. We want those sorts of things to be web apps.
Speak for yourself!
I'm just repeating what the market says. Also, it's damn nice to be able to access stuff like my time sheet entry application from anywhere. You and luddites like @wharrgarbl may claim to want something different, but I suspect you're either bullshitting or you haven't fully thought through the alternatives.
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@boomzilla said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
It's very inadequate for a lot of the stuff I do day to day.
I never saw it as something you'd use day to day.
I saw it as something my wife the accountant would use.
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@xaade said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
@boomzilla said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
It's very inadequate for a lot of the stuff I do day to day.
I never saw it as something you'd use day to day.
I saw it as something my wife the accountant would use.
Um...I meant the queries I write for the accountants and so forth who use the application that I work on.
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@boomzilla said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
Also, it's damn nice to be able to access stuff like my time sheet entry application from anywhere.
It would be nice if there was an application browser that didn't use an interactive environment based on the concept of a document.
There have been multiple attempts to inject such a space into browser documents, but they haven't really stuck around (silverlight).
Hell, people have wanted it so bad that they used a interactive video player as an application platform (flash).
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@boomzilla said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
Um...I meant the queries I write for the accountants and so forth who use the application that I work on.
Can't you write queries free-form in Access?
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@xaade said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
Can't you write queries free-form in Access?
Oh, now we're not concerned with helpful tooling that allows the masses to write software?
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Ok, I'm just going to step outside of this discussion, as it appears to insist on a false dilemma.
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@blakeyrat said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
Everything worth doing is difficult. One of the things I hate most about the whole open source mindset is that you constantly hear "oh we didn't do that because it's difficult" or "that feature would take too much time to get right". It's like they want preschool software development for babies.
I do not say that we should not try to make it.
I will certainly try to build some visual scripting system, will let you know when there are some results :)
For example, my friend tried making avisual representation for C# code:
I hope at some point a new programming technology will finally succeed.
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@xaade said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
Ok, I'm just going to step outside of this discussion, as it appears to insist on a false dilemma.
Um, OK...sure.
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@yamikuronue said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
I spent two hours this morning figuring out my fucking build chain before I could write so much as a line of code.
Fuck programming. I'm going to run away and become a dog trainer.
Recently I wasted like 2 hours to set up SeriLog with PostgreSQL (using what they call there "a sink", which is basically a trace source). So, logger would fail silently, no entries got inserted to the DB. When I finally managed to turn on the SeriLog debugger and fought my way through this stuff, I learned that:
- names in Postgres are case sensitive.
- the fucking "sink" I'm using sure, it accepts table and column names, but it casts them to fucking lowercase.
Training dogs would be nice.
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@kt_ said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
Training dogs would be nice.
It's no different. You'd spend 2 hours explaining to an old lady that it's a goat.
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@xaade said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
@kt_ said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
Training dogs would be nice.
It's no different. You'd spend 2 hours explaining to an old lady that it's a goat.
I'd happily
fu…train a goat!
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@dreikin said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
All my interaction with it is in the context of gaming.
OMG You game? /me scribbles a checkbox on a hidden list
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@e4tmyl33t said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
two from here
Wait, what's the other one? And why haven't I been invited? I suck at running Discord...
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@tsaukpaetra said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
@e4tmyl33t said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
two from here
Wait, what's the other one? And why haven't I been invited? I suck at running Discord...
There's the "official" one, and then there was a tiny one that @Magus had set up for an attempt at an online mahjong group that never really got too far off the ground that I'm still joined to.
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@yamikuronue said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
I'm going to run away and become a dog trainer.
Wags tail, makes eye contact and barks
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@xaade said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
@yamikuronue said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
"I want a textbox, a date picker, and a submit button, and you're going to put the data into a storage somewhere, and later spit it back out on this page after doing math to it."
Of course you can.
At my first company...
I wrote a program that scraped our old MFC screens and built WPF ones to replace them, and used compiled XAML instead of the old compiled MFC config. Threw the same driving code behind it, and it worked. Kinda. The screens would have to be tweaked because pixels changed since then, but it worked.
I got the idea from my coworker, who wrote a program that used the captured events from our bug reporting to automated replay the users actions on our side to see if the bug was fixed.
We used our customer's actions to create regression UI testing.
This sounds awesome! Too bad our users would scream "Stop spying on us!"
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@gurth said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
With bottom-replying, the idea is that you delete the bits of the message that you’re not specifically replying to.
That's one stupid-ass idea.
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@boomzilla said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
No, but seriously, users can't even think through the things that they want to do, let alone figure out how to make it happen. It's simply a skill that many people don't seem to be able to develop. And complicated stuff is still complicated.
We're still trying to figure out how to get people to put their heads in paintings (in an area devoted to that act) which teleports them to different areas.
We have fake avatars with their heads in said position on either side of a demonstration painting (so three paintings in total), and the most reaction we get is "huh, that's weird" followed by people just passing by and missing 80% of the experience...
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@e4tmyl33t Still up for it any time, if anyone else wants in there. Tabletop Sim exists, and we could always all buy Action Mahjong off steam :D
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@tsaukpaetra It worked for Mario and one of the Belmonts.
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@e4tmyl33t said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
@tsaukpaetra said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
@e4tmyl33t said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
two from here
Wait, what's the other one? And why haven't I been invited? I suck at running Discord...
There's the "official" one, and then there was a tiny one that @Magus had set up for an attempt at an online mahjong group that never really got too far off the ground that I'm still joined to.
Oh yeah, I forgot about that one! Sorry, time ran away from me and I never did get to try it...
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@magus said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
@tsaukpaetra It worked for Mario and one of the Belmonts.
Yeah, but we couldn't just out right say "Hey, treat this like Mario 64!". It might have been more obvious if we duplicated the wavy-picture effect, but then again, legal stuff...
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@tsaukpaetra said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
@yamikuronue said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
I'm going to run away and become a dog trainer.
Wags tail, makes eye contact and barks
Who's a good boy!?
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@yamikuronue said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
@tsaukpaetra said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
@yamikuronue said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
I'm going to run away and become a dog trainer.
Wags tail, makes eye contact and barks
Who's a good boy!?
Leans forward, paws outstretched, ears forward, panting increases
I... Is it me? Have I been assigned the maleness today? Thank you!
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@tsaukpaetra It is! It is you!